Mike Billington
Schiller Institute’s Land-Bridge Policy Will Change the World

We have heard today about the threat of war and the necessary solutions. I want you now to think strategically about how we are to implement those solutions. This requires looking down, from the top, at the entire world, at the entire Solar System, and to look at it from the future, not as a fixed snapshot of today, but as a dynamic unity, and to think how we must act to achieve that future which we foresee, which you are capable of doing precisely because you are human. You must think as if you are personally responsible for the fate of mankind, because in a very real sense, you are.

After 70 years of Britain’s Cold War, and the failure to implement Lyn and Helga LaRouche’s plan for Eurasian peace and development after the fall of the Soviet Union, Americans have accepted the false conception that Russia and China are somehow our natural adversaries, or even our enemies. In fact, the opposite is the case. While the U.S. has fallen under the control of the British system of financial dictatorship since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and “regime change” imperialism under Bush-Cheney and Obama, the legacy of the American System has lived on in Russia and China, and is now expressing itself in the leadership of those two great nations.

Global Reach of the American System

A brief review of that history will show both the role of the American System, which made Russia and China our closest allies before the death of Franklin Roosevelt, but also the direct influence of Lyn and Helga LaRouche in bringing that tradition forward in those two nations today, as well as in India, although the centuries of British domination in India have left its mark there.

The Russian-U.S. ties were concretized by America’s greatest statesman, John Quincy Adams, who was the first Ambassador to Russia, from 1809 to 1914. When the British instigated the Civil War in the United States in 1860, both to divide the U.S. and to retain the slavery system providing cotton for the British textile factories, Tsar Alexander II deployed the Russian fleet right here in the New York harbor, as well as the San Francisco harbor, as a clear warning to the British that its intervention to support the South would mean war with Russia.

Lincoln and his economists, especially Henry Carey, introduced the Greenbacks to break the British and Wall Street control over credit during the Civil War. He also launched one of the greatest infrastructure projects of our history to that time, the Transcontinental Railroad (Figure 1), at the peak of that war, in 1863. After the war, these economists took the American System ideas to Europe, and the model of the Transcontinental Railroad inspired Russia to launch the great Trans-Siberian Railway (Figure 2), which was built between 1891 and 1916. Thus, the Atlantic and the Pacific were linked by rail across North America, and the Pacific and Europe were linked across Eurasia.

In China, the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the monarchy and established the Republic of China, was led by the great statesman Sun Yat-sen, who had been educated in Hawaii by Christian missionaries from the school of Henry Carey. Sun modeled his economic policies on the credit system of Alexander Hamilton; his Three Principles of the People—national sovereignty, republican government, and the general welfare of the people—were taken directly from the U.S. Constitution and from Abraham Lincoln’s formulation in the Gettysburg Address: “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Figure 3 - Sun Yat Sen's railroad grid plan.

Figure 4

Sun Yat-sen released his plan for the industrialization of China in 1919 (Figure 3), based on large-scale infrastructure, especially rail, which criss-crossed the nation and extended out of the country, connecting with the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and to the the west and the south. Although the plan was sabotaged by the British, look at the map of China’s rail today (Figure 4), including extensions to the northeast to connect to a tunnel under the Bering Strait, which China has now offered to build together with the Russians—and we insist, with the United States; to the northeast, which connects to the Trans-Siberian; to the west, which, as of 2013, has been transporting goods from China to Europe through Central Asia; and three branches to the south, to Vietnam, and operative plans to build rail through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia, to Singapore—the Orient Express, to the northwest—and through Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India, over the old “Burma Road,” built by the Americans in World War II, and on to the Mideast and Africa.

Schiller Institute Organizing

Figure 5 - Eurasian Landbridge map

Now look at the map presented by Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the conference in Beijing in 1996, on the Eurasian Land-Bridge (Figure 5), a conference she was primarily responsible for organizing, and where she became known as the “Silk Road Lady.” The lasting influence of her work at that time can be seen in the recent announcement by the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to adopt the New Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road as a primary focus of China’s outreach to the world.

Figure 6

Following Helga’s visit to China in February 2014, where she held meetings and press interviews in Beijing and Shanghai, the leading international journal of China, Beijing Review, ran a cover story of their weekly magazine on Helga’s ideas and proposals (Figure 6), with both an article and a link[1] to the video interview.

In all her meetings, she emphasized that the rail proposals only have meaning if they are perceived as strategic interventions into the collapsing world economy and the immediate threat of global thermonuclear war. The proper concept is that of a “development corridor,” not only connecting centers of civilization through often desolate and extremely difficult terrain, but transforming these regions, using new technologies to create new cities and farmland suitable for human habitation. This means especially power and water, especially nuclear power, and water, through water management and the application of the high energy-flux densities of nuclear and fusion power for desalination where feasible, and through new technologies, such as drawing water from the atmosphere through ionization processes, as is being investigated intensely by our science team, to transform deserts, from Africa through China, as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

Figure 7 - Bering Strait Tunnel Route

Now look at the Bering Strait Tunnel plan (Figure 7). This was one of the Great Projects supported by LaRouche in the 1980s, for transforming the world to meet the common aims of mankind. When the Soviet Union fell, and LaRouche was brought into Russia by scientific and economic leaders of the nation in the 1990s to plan for the necessary future of mankind, the idea of the tunnel connecting the United States and Russia was embraced as a means of both transforming the barren regions of the Russian Far East and of Alaska and the Yukon, as well as initiating a great project which directly unites the two nations through their actual mutual benefit.

In 2007, Lyndon LaRouche was invited to give a keynote presentation at a conference in Moscow on the building of the tunnel under the Bering Strait. President Vladimir Putin showed his insight into the future by describing the project as a “war avoidance policy,” the Peace Through Development concept so drastically lacking in the imperial West today.

A team at EIR—Executive Intelligence Review, our weekly magazine, which you should definitely subscribe to if you have not already—is now nearing completion of a fully updated version of the programmatic report we produced after the 1996 Land-Bridge Conference in Beijing. This is a Global Land-Bridge (Figure 8). It reviews the progress on the great projects since that time, but also where progress has been stymied, and where the failure to develop has created huge areas of desolation and poverty and war, and even the expansion of desertification due to the failure of mankind to assert its power of self-evolution through scientific and technological progress.

Figure 9 - Kra Canal Route

We will present the necessary solutions for these problems, such as the “Revolutionary Development Plan for the Near and Middle East,” authored by the Schiller Institute’s Hussein Askary. We have programs for the development of Africa and Ibero-America, and similar programs for other parts of the world. We will review the campaign led by Lyndon LaRouche in the 1980s to build a sea-level canal through the Isthmus of Kra in southern Thailand (Figure 9), which was sabotaged by the British, but is now back on the table—this time with support from both Japan and China (Figure 10). Our Japanese friend Mr. Kotegawa[2] is strongly backing this as a necessary joint project between China and Japan—not only because it will be of great benefit to both, but also because it will help China and Japan get past the conflicts between them.

We will report on the Tumen River Project, where Russia, China, and North Korea come together, where just this past week the Russians and the North Koreans, with full South Korean support, agreed to proceed with the construction of rail and pipelines through the North to the South—again, Peace Through Development—whereas Obama simply threatens to do as he says or face military confrontation.

We will review the plans put forth by our friends in Russia for the transformation of Afghanistan and Central Asia, in cooperation with China’s New Silk Road. Just this past week, our good friends in Russia Yuri Krupnov, head of a major development institution, and Viktor Ivanov, the nation’s anti-drug czar, met with other Eurasian leaders in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, presenting their proposals for ending the chaos in Afghanistan and the region. As Krupnov said, “It is obvious to everyone that there will be no stabilization in the region unless the drug-based economy is replaced with a positive one.”

All these are necessary, but they cannot be achieved if we do not first achieve the alliance of the four great powers—Russia, China, India, and the U.S.—the U.S. under new leadership, of course, American System leadership, as provided by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.

Lyn has therefore focused on the area from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Basin, the far western border of China, the Russian Far East, Southeast Asia, and India. The Eurasian nations have retained the idea of progress, where every meeting of heads of state agrees to yet more cooperation in energy, rail, water, space, and scientific research, and fighting drugs and terrorism. Yet every meeting of heads of state in the West can discuss nothing but new means of printing money to bail out the banks, while imposing deadly austerity on their populations, and cutting development and science funds to the bone, while preparing for war on Russia and China, in collaboration with terrorists and neo-nazis. We must bring the U.S. into the Eurasian geometry, the American System geometry.

From this brief presentation, I think you can see that nearly every positive development taking place in the world today has been affected in one way or another, directly, by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. This comes from Lyn’s method—looking at the world as a unified dynamic process, governed by the human mind, with compassion for each and every human being on the planet. This is true leadership, which we must reproduce in ourselves, in our cowardly political leaders, and in the population.

Now look at the map of the global deserts (Figure 11). It is not coincidental that the vast stretch of desert from the western shore of North Africa, through the Middle East, Central Asia, and into western China, is extremely poor (except for a few oil sheikdoms owned by the British), and also the scene of perpetual warfare, “color revolutions” run by London and Washington, which leave nations in ruins, and overrun by terrorist organizations spawned in London, as well as harboring the majority of global drug production, also run by London and its banks.

Only a return to the American System in the United States, and an alliance with Russia and China, where that system is still alive, can make possible the realization of these great projects, and the necessary return to global cooperation in the exploration and development of space, of the Solar System and beyond.

Against these policies, today as over the past many centuries, stands the British Empire, using its genocidal green ideology, its controlled terrorist gangs, and its drug trade to prevent development, destroy minds, and poison the future, all to sustain the power of its bankrupt financial system, and to cull the world’s human population to a more “manageable” size of a billion or so, from the current 7 billion plus.

We know the future, and we know the enemy. It is our task to fulfill the mission presented here today.

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your contributions enable us to publish, sponsor conferences, and support other activities which are critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.